I make things

Category: 2nd Year

EVALUATION

I am really glad we had to work on this project. It helped me realise how important marketing is for the feature and what should I do about promoting my 3rd year’s film. Another good thing was the fact that I had to give a shape to my final film, I am still not 100% sure how I want it to look like (that’s because I didn’t edit the videos I recorded yet) but at least I have a clearer image of what I would like to do. I realise that the way I wrote this essay might be a little bit unusual but I just thought that if I make it in a form of a list it someone else might find it useful (I think my ideas are pretty good and it’s handy to have it all down in points). I’ve done quite a bit of research unfortunately I didn’t manage to read the journal Jemma suggested (website would not open the pdf…) and now I feel like my research is not sufficient because I have no hard references in the essay, but I couldn’t help it. I’ll try harder next time, and maybe I’ll also try to be in England so I could just go to the library… Overall I fell more confident in the promotion matter and I will try to make marketing plan over summer for my final project.

And now lets have a great summer please!

P.S.

I’m going to China this summer so visit the blog somewhere in august for some cool picks and stuff.

Winnie-the-Pooh(1960) – soviet version of the famous tale. Directed by Fyodor Khitruk.

Watch it here (I find this version much more hilarious) :

My Idea

A few sketches

And a a few versions close to the final outcome

Final version won’t have a dot at the end of the title – its up there only because I measured the space wrong….

I decided on a Cyrillic written title, because I would like my 3rd year film to have everything written/recorded in Russian with subtitles on top of it (I will probably make a different language versions of the poster, but for now you have to bear with this one).

Сказка means Tale. Not a fairy-tale not a real life story, a little bit of everything.

THE IDEA

My 3rd year’s animation will be a lose retelling story of my grandmothers life.

Through her life grandma lived in many cities and villages of Soviet Union, she have experienced a lot and she has many tales to tell. I had a little time to record some of them, while she was visiting my parents home in Poland, unfortunately she was leaving for Siberia in 4 days. I didn’t edit the footage yet and I am still not 100% sure what I want to use and what should I go with, but I have a little concept in my head. I would like my grandmothers story to be presented as a symbiosis of reality and a fairy tail. Russian art is really magical, everything has this Slavic folklore feeling. Its all about pretty! I really feel like I have to try and connect this things. Russia is a state of mind in many ways…

With the film promotion I will try to use conventional and not, ways to get to the audience and intrigue them.

In the poster aspect, I am thinking of making the hand drawn illustration on the black paper. It should emphasise the magical aspect of the piece as well as keep it mysterious and serious since most likely it wont be a funny film.

RESEARCH

It’s Such a Beautiful Day (2012)

Promoting itself

This film is a great example on how good film can get audience without the whole fancy promotion team behind it. Created by Don Hertzfeldt It’s Such a Beautiful Day basically promoted itself. It had a really short cinema run and right after that you could watch it on the internet, other than this film went to many festivals and it won some stuff. That’s it. The end. Send your films to the festivals. Let known people and critics write about it.

(but if you can afford it, do some promotion as well… )

THE POSTER

Some of my opinions come from: 1 and the rest just happened to be in my head…

John Carter (2012)

How to not promote…

Even thought the film was directed by Andrew Stanton who is known for making the box office bomb productions, and even thought Disney gave him a free hand on the creation, film made only $30.6 million in the U.S. over the weekend (making it cost $350 million). Who is here to blame? Mainly – the marketing team. First problem is changing the title from John Carter of Mars to John Carter – marketing team was “worried” that the Mars part will push away the regular Disney movie goers. Doesn’t John Carter just sound boring? Wasn’t this part kind of important in the story? Why did they assume that audience will know who John Carter is? There is really many question marks in here…

Another problem are posters which don’t really show anything. When I saw it I thought to myself “It’s like Tarzan, Planet of the Apes and Mad Max (?) in one? What?”. It really would be good if they showed at least a little bit more.

3rd absolutely no one mentions the fact that the film is based on the book…

And at last, trailers. They are boring (and what’s with the Led Zeppelin music?), and the only message they bring across is – “low story “man” film that’s all about explosions and stuff….”. I thought they were afraid to lose typical Disney audience who is mainly all about love story. There is a love story in the film, why is the trailer missing to show it? In general trailers don’t really explain what to expect and don’t trigger interest, sadly…

Eduardo Sanchez and Daniel Myrick’s baby is one of the biggest box office successes that ever happened. Film made with about $60,000 earned nearly $250 million and marketing had a big part in it.

The whole film was surrounded by mystery, because it’s story and clever marketing made people wonder if it really happened. Long before the film release producers created a site blairwitch.com (unfortunately the page now contains information about the Blair Witch (2016) film) which featured pictures of the missing actors, the story, police testimonies etc. IMDb listed the actors as “presumed dead”. There were short teasers aired on TV channels claiming the film to be a true story. Film was classified in the found footage genre. There were also “missing person” flyers and posters distributed around the world, and the internet was just taking of so it really was the first film ever to go viral (didn’t even need social media).

Unfortunately I was unable to read this… I’ve found it in the library’s online resources but it wouldn’t open…

What is the key to successful promotion?

Here I made list of the things I find important for the successful promotion:

GOOD TITLE – if you wanna catch audiences interest the first thing you need is a catchy, interesting title.

SOMETHING REMARKABLE – try to intrigue the public, find something in the film which would be cool to see in the real life and show it off. People will definitely want to watch your film just to find out what the hell.

SOCIAL MEDIA – create a page for your feature on social media and make it fun, if you can offer some extra experience to your audience. Little by little release some interesting facts about the story and other things.

PRE-ROLL AD – Make a 5 second teaser (many pages offers you 5 seconds of advertising time for free), make it really cool and exciting, don’t forget about call to action (send then to the fb page etc.).

THE PRESS – try hard to have someone talk about your production, send it to people who you think would like it but their word also matters in the society (free advertising!).

CREATE INTERACTIVE EXPERIENCE FOR THE VIEWERS (outside of the film) – if you can, try to make a game in which your audience could feel like they are part of the world from the film. It doesn’t have to be anything fancy, it’s just to answer their question where would they fit in the world you created.

ADD IT TO ONLINE FILM DATABASE – if you won’t do it, then who will. It is very important to have your film somewhere in the film database, so people could vote for it. The more people you reach the wider audience it will bring you.

INVOLVE AUDIENCE IN FILM MAKING – Create a competition where the winning party will appear in the feature, or they can meat up with the crew etc. Make it exciting.

TRAILER IS THE KEY – Good trailer is really the key. Choose your audience and make your trailer interesting for them.

GOOD POSTER – Some people won’t get a chance to look at your trailer and that’s why you need a good poster which will leave the right feeling on the potential audience member.

COOL LOOKING WEBPAGE – More interested people might want to have even bigger connection with the feature and so here is the space for a cool looking webpage. It doesn’t have to be amazing it just has to look good and have a few things where you cant find anywhere.

AUCTION THE FILM PROPS – SELL IT! If you have some props that are cool people will buy it.

BREAK THE BANK WITH MERCHANDISE – another key to success is merchandise. Posters, t-shirts, figures, bags, toys EVERYTHING. If it’s cool, it will sell and it will bring you more fans. It is also a good idea to have special edition items (people go crazy for them).

This brief has been partially created to help us start thinking about our final animation for the 3rd year of study.

I believe that most time will be spent on research in order to fully understand audience, how the promotion works and how to achieve the biggest impact. All this knowledge will be very important while creating our final film as well as in the future.

EVALUATION

I would like to say that I am very proud of us, for finishing this project on time (actually about 3 hours before deadline) and for achieving our goal. Animation looks like we wanted and it really is a great feeling. We have received an email from BYG Systems, they said that they are pleased with our animation (and we are going to see them on Tuesday YAY)

Comparing our animation with the storyboard or animatic you can see that we were well organised and we really did try to follow the plan, the only new part we added was the Matrix “letter” transition it was because the scenes before and after were animated by two different persons and the transition between them weren’t smooth enough, also we thought it makes the Matrix gag stronger. Hopefully looking through our blogs you will be able to tell that we tried hard to follow all the suggestions we got given in order to achieve the best result.

There really isn’t much bad I can tell about our final product. I find all sounds great, editing made by Aaron (with our little help) has great timing and the speed of animation is just right, nothing drags which is great.

We always tried to be on time with everything, even though we didn’t meet BYG’s expectations with the conference call we worked hard to get back on the track. We made sure to stay in close contact with them.

Group work as probably always could be better but we are all still learning soo it was great anyway (just look at the video xD). We managed our roles well, and everyone made sure to do their job right.

Next time we should try to manage our time even better so we could end final to the company early enough to be able to apply any changes if there will be some.

DONE!

SOUNDS & GROUP WORK

Sound

Our narrator will be Aarons partner who’s voice is just perfect for this type of video (we are so lucky really!) other sound we will get from https://www.freesound.org/ , we will also make sure to choose the ones without copyrights.

Group Work

To simplify our group work we created a group page on the facebook as well as a group chat and a folder on the dropbox. This way it is really easy to communicate and access files.

I am also quite happy with the way our group works. Of course we had some hard moments but we managed to solve them. The most important thing is that everyone is committed to produce the best product we are capable of.

LAST PROGRESS UPDATE

We are nearly finished with our animation just 2 scenes to finish and a few touch ups also BYG suggested that we should speed the pace up and make sure everything has good timing

In the Kung fu part, the perspective change of the red and left grey character(not finished in this animatic) had to be made in Adobe illustrator frame by frame. I have to say it was a little bit challenging, especially the grey one (which I expected to be easier).

CLOSE TO THE END PROGRESS & OTHER STUFF

While me and Aaron were working on some changes to the environment of the scenes Maria was creating a rig with Duik plug for After Effects.

I must say that this rig wasn’t a dream tool to animate what we needed but we managed and it doesn’t look that bad (I think)

I forgotten to mention before:

Designs

We designed our characters and environment in Adobe Illustrator. We chose it because BYG System’s logo we received was made in it and it is also good in cooperation with After Effects. Vector graphic is generally simple and easy, therefore it seemed to be the best choice.

Character Designs

Changes we made to character seem to be a really good choice. Our characters look cute but not too much, they definitely seem alive, 3 dimensional and more friendly (we made limb shorter and thicker, added white to the eyes and glimpse in them, also they are more simplified no and don’t have assigned sex).

Progress

Sorry for the bad quality but I had troubles with internet and i recorded it with my phone just to update my group on the progress.